Posted on August 4th, 2015 08:58 AM EST

Spawn on ships

Another feature is also the functionality that you can now spawn on moving ships. Even if the ship is moved after you logged out, and then in a sector that is currently not loaded, you will still spawn on your ship. This will work as long as you are in any way aligned to the ship while logging out: Pilot, in gravity, or simple spacebar alignment.

This currently is limited to spawn after logout, but mechanics will come for respawning on ships after death. There still have to be some gameplay aspects discussed, as you wouldn't want a player to spawn on a ship you just stole.

Ship Scores

Another larger feature which is still in the making is ship score. This is basically a way to automatically classify ships. Ship scores are aggregated from multiple simpler scores. As for example weapons generate scores from:

damage per second

hit probability (projectile speed, reload, spread)

distance

power consumption

These scores are then aggregated with the power score, and other scores to generate 4 main scores:

Offensive Score

Defensive Score

Mobility Score

Support Score

Since it's fairly obvious that these values have to be balanced, the main scoring process has been externalized to a LUA script to change it on the fly.

After a few iterations of initial balance not only will they make it easier to classify ships in the blueprint/website, we can also then use the scores to determine pirate spawning by difficulty, and adapt it depending on how powerful the combined scores of the players in an area are, which should lead to a lot better scaling difficulty and therefore more fun.

Exploit Fixes and Optimizations

There also have been lots of small optimizations in various parts of the game. For example, framerates on very large structures should go up a bit when higher max-segments are set in the options.

There also have been some fixes to exploitations of game mechanics like the shield drain/supply being overpowered. Also cloaking/jamming now has a reload sequence when switched off.

Balance

The block behavior config received some minor changes:

Power consumption per second was changed to power consumption per tick, all related values were changed accordingly.

EMP power damage was doubled, the power damage dealt to a ship is 2 times higher than the power consumed to fire that weapon.

Shield drain, supply and power drain received some value changes, it should be balanced: Shield drain has the same shield DPS and power use as any other basic weapon but it gives you 50% of the drained HP. Shield supply is set to power supply levels, its power consumption is 10 times lower though since a supply transfers 100% of your own shield. Power drain, drains 50% less power than an equal EMP weapon but you gain 50% of the drained power.

Shield drain and supply now allow supports.

Bugfixes

A list of fixed bugs can be found in the original post[star-made.org].